Ergas at his most pretentious

I got to Henry Ergas' column in the Australian today via his twitter link to it, and what a special bit of irrelevant pretentiousness it is.   

Most of it is about a Greek play,and attacks Palaszczuk and Andrews for their handling of COVID-19, with hyperbole thrown in:

There is, for sure, a chance that they will succeed; the gods, who in Greek tragedy could always be counted on to mete out harsh justice, having long left the scene, little stands between us and the ancients’ presumption, amply justified by every page of political history, that some agents of government will use all the scope they have to entrench their position — including by acting brutally and immorally — unless they are prevented from doing so.

With the crisis removing many of those constraints, our democracy appears to have slipped closer to the edge of the precipice than one might have thought possible.

Not for the first time I say:  what a tedious wanker.   

He finally gets around to some modern political philosophising:

Judith Shklar, the Harvard professor whose lectures on ­Antigone and political obligation were recently published post­humously, captured them brilliantly. The liberalism we inherited from the 19th century, she wrote, was a “liberalism of hope” — the hope, most of all, that one could create the basis for human flourishing.

But these dark times, which offer so much room for manipulation and deceit, demand a renewed emphasis on the “liberalism of fear” that instead of concentrating on how to bring about the greatest good, focuses on averting the greatest ills.

Rather than striving for the utopian perfectibility of mankind, the liberalism of fear seeks to limit the damage, so that we can feel free because the government does not, indeed cannot, terrorise us — be it by handcuffing pregnant women for organising innocent protests or by denying to grieving families the solace of farewelling the dead.

I'm not even sure I can make sense of that last paragraph - but whatever.

The main point is one I have been repeating for years - twits on the Right like Ergas are too interested in culture wars to be able to actually recognise real and serious threat warnings from scientists, be it climate change or dangerous pandemics.  They discount "the greatest ills" because they would rather believe cranks and "do nothing" advocates because they imagine that scientists and politicians who take them seriously are only doing so in order to increase the role of government.  

And as for "danger to democracy" - I hardly notice much of what Ergas writes, but I have only ever seen him defend Donald Trump, which makes his claims of democracy under threat from 2 Australian Premiers all the more ludicrous.